Parallel imaging using coil arrays with a large number of independent coil elements provides improved imaging performance and increased signal to noise ratio. Today, there is a fundamental trend to considerably increase the number of coil elements used for reception. Recently, 32-element coils have been introduced to boost SNR and to allow for higher reduction factors (Niendorf T., Hardy C. J., Giaquinto R. O., Gross P., Cline H. E., Zhu Y., Kenwood G., Cohen S., Grant A. K., Joshi S., Rofsky N. M., Sodickson D. K. (2006) Toward single breath-hold whole-heart coverage coronary MRA using highly accelerated parallel imaging with a 32-channel MR system. Magn Reson Med 56: 167-176).
Even more complex coil arrays have been proposed and realized, consisting of up to 128 individual elements. However, a number of these coil arrays have been used on systems supporting only 32 receive channels. The use of a large number of coil array elements can lead to memory storage problems and to increased reconstruction times.
To overcome these problems, data reduction techniques could be applied. These can be realized by a linear combination of the original coil data prior to reception, using an appropriate hardware combiner, data compression of the sample data before reconstruction, or by discarding particular data from coil elements with low signal content (either before or after reception).
U.S. Pat. No. 7,279,893 discloses an image reconstruction technique which determines linear combinations of receiver channel information that contribute the most to image SNR to reduce the computational burden placed on the reconstruction engine of an MRI system and which quantifies the SNR loss for the reduced receiver channel set for image reconstruction.
It is a goal of the invention to provide an improved method of selecting a set of coil elements from a multitude of physical coil elements comprised in a coil array for performing a magnetic resonance imaging scan, an improved computer program product and an improved magnetic resonance imaging system